Tat was great to hear, but when you’re living
in Iran there’s not a lot of college scouts looking for football players. So aſter I graduated, I went to work. My goal was to save enough money to go to college and somehow find a way to play football. I soon realized the money I was making wouldn’t be enough, so I joined the Army to get the GI Bill to help pay for college—I became a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne Division. When I went in, I was 6’4” and 165 pounds.
Knowing my size wasn’t going to cut it, I started working out every chance I could get. Te guys in my unit called me the “muscle head” because if I wasn’t working out in the gym, I was doing sprints to get faster. And all of that work and dedication paid off, because by my last year in the military I got up to almost 240 pounds.
W
hile I was in, I found out that our division chaplain had been an All-American outside
linebacker at Kansas State and that he had helped place guys from our division into colleges to play football, so I asked if he could help me out as well. About six months from geting out, he made some calls and talked to Notre Dame. Tey were very interested and wanted me to visit, but the chaplain said I’d probably ride the bench for a few years before I could play. Aſter finding out I was from Michigan, he told
me there were some good Division I schools there. He named Western, Central and Eastern and asked what school I’d want to go to. Since I have relatives in the Detroit area and my grandma worked at a manufacturing plant in Ypsilanti back in World War II, I told him Eastern. I guess I was what you call a preferred walk-on.
Michael Bailey Smith plays Pluto, one of the more imposing Mutants in “The Hills Have Eyes.”
Now, having not played football for three years because of the military, there was really only one thing I could do well and that was hit. So I made sure I was first in line in every drill and came in first on every sprint. I did everything I could to get recognized and make an impression. In my red-shirt freshman year, 1981, I moved up to second-
string center. I also got to be on special teams, both kickoff and punt. Tat’s when I got to play in my first college game. It was a night game, at home, against Akron. Tat night I flew around and
made two or three tackles; it was an incredible experience. Because of how well I played, that next Monday they moved
me to starting right guard. I practiced for a week and then we traveled to Illinois State. I’d like to say I played great during the game, that I made the big block to help us score the winning touchdown, but that’s the farthest thing from the truth. I got my but kicked the whole game and, needless to say, I was moved back to second-string center. But I didn’t let that stop me.
Eastern | SPRING 2013 41
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